I am Hammer, and you, Mr. Rollin, are Tongs. Your book made my ears to tingle quite as sharply as if you had actually boxed them. I must, however, in justice to the little hair that Time has left me, positively state that, even while I was perusing your most powerful passages, it showed no propensity for the perpendicular. I felt very nervous for all that; for still—although I could hardly believe that a French gentleman residing for a few months in the neighbourhood of Leicester Square, London, could possibly obtain a thorough knowledge, either from study or personal observation, of the political, legislative, agricultural, agrarian, prelatical, judicial, colonial, commercial, manufacturing, social, and educational systems and condition of this empire—yet, from the unqualified manner in which you deliver yourself upon all these branches, I cannot choose but think that your pages must, like certain fictions, be at least founded on _some_ fact; that to have concocted your volume—of smoke—there must be some fire somewhere. Or is it only the smell of it? For, Sir, even an alarm of fire is unpleasant; and, to an elderly gentleman with a very small stake in the country (prudently inserted in the three per cent. consols), reading of the dreadful things which you say are to happen to one’s own native land is exceedingly uncomfortable, especially at night; when “in silence and in gloom” one broods over one’s miseries, personal and national; when, in fact, your or any one else’s _bête noire_ is apt to get polished off with a few extra touches of blacking. Bless me! when I put my candle out the other night, and thought of your portrait of Britannia, I quite shook; and when I lay down I could almost fancy her shadow on the wall. Even now I see her looking uncommonly sickly, in spite of the invigorating properties of the waves she so constantly “rules;” the trident and shield—her “supporters” for ages—can hardly keep her up. Grief, and forebodings of the famine which you promise, has made her dwindle down from Great to Little Britain. The British Lion at her feet is in the last stage of consumption; in such a shocking state of collapse, that he will soon be in a condition to jump out of his skin; but you do not point out the Ass who is to jump into it.